Meet Jessie Montgomery, composer of 'Strum' for String Quartet, a piece performed during the European Music Gallery Festival 2020 Bratislava and Košice.

Jessie Montgomery is one of the most relevant and promising composers of her generation in the United States of America. The uniqueness of both her musical style and special voice which grabs a broad audience comes from the extraordinary environment of her childhood.

Strum was one of the first compositions that Montgomery wrote for the Providence String Quartet and guest artists of Community MusicWorks Players in 2006. It was originally intended as a string quintet with two cellos, allowing it to be paired in concert with the String Quintet in C Major by Schubert. In 2008, she arranged the piece for quartet with several small revisions and in 2012, the piece underwent its final revisions with a rewrite of both the introduction and the ending in a performance by the Catalyst String Quartet celebrating the 15th annual Sphinx Competition. The quartet starts with an alluring pizzicato motive in the viola part which eventually goes through each instrument in different ways.

Montgomery said, “ I came up with that during a quartet rehearsal… You know when you are in the rehearsal, you are not supposed to be fiddling around with your instrument but I happened to be fiddling around and I thought, that is kind of cool! Luckily, I remembered it afterwards and I decided to use it as the motive for the piece”. After a poetic pizzicato beginning, the cello interrupts the conversation between viola and second violin with a simple but beautiful tune played sul tasto, or ‘over the fingerboard’. Eventually, every instrument joins in and one can practically hear a “discussion“ between them. The whole piece is a beautiful combination of different rhythms and colorful harmonies enriched by the pizzicato sound. The smooth changes of the diverse rhythmical markings within the piece give the listener the feeling of a wonderful journey. There are noticeable similarities with Rising, Joan Tower’s composition. By combining basic compositional qualities in opposing directions, both create wonderful excitement and tension that accompany the listener throughout the piece.